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114 Gustavus and bishop Brask. HISTORY OF THE SWEDES. Assumes supremacy in the church. [1524—
Men now began to be aware with whom they had
to do ; but they scarcely yet comprehended the full
measure of that intrepidity which in Gustavus was
usually evolved stroke by stroke, as the resistance
offered and the circumstances of the case demanded,
from a beginning that was apparently tranquil and
even compliant. For such al way was his
commencement, unless urgent necessity prescribed a
different line, and he ever went greater lengths than
even his opponents expected. Signs like these
announce to us the soul which teems with a future
yet unrevealed. Those who wish to study his
character in this phase from its earliest disclosure,
may be referred to the correspondence with bishop
Brask, as one of the main sources for the history of
the first year of his reign. This prelate was beyond
comparison the most influential, as well as the most
sagacious and best informed man of his day in
Sweden4 ; in his way the upright friend of his country,
for whose economic prosperity he formed projects
which Gustavus himself, and subsequently others
of Sweden’s distinguished men, again revived 5 ; a
fi’iend too of Swedish liberty, as he himself
understood it, and as he explains it in letters to his friend
Thure Jenson, " that the freedom of the realm
depended on the church and the baronage 0 ;" for
which reason he opposed, and afterwards censured,
the government of the Stures 7. He treated the
young king from the beginning with a kind of
fatherly superiority, styling him administrator and
" dear Gustavus," and accepting in return the title
of " gracious lord." Shortly after the royal
election, he obtained a confirmation of all the privileges
of his bishopric and church8. But he was soon
destined himself to feel the force of the king’s
saying to the last catholic archbishop, Joannes
Magnus,—" Thy grace and our grace have not room
beneath one roof9." With the aggressions of
Gustavus on the clergy began the prelate’s opposition ;
and with every impediment thrown in his way, the
king went one step farther, as if he were bent on
reducing his most powerful adversary to
extremities, so that the latter at length determined, after
the example of Joannes Magnus, to quit the
kingdom. But he was first to see the hierarchy of
Sweden completely overthrown. Presages of its
downfall were already fast accumulating.
Olave Peterson, although a priest, entered into
wedlock at Stockholm in 1525. " He will defend
this by God’s law," writes the king to bishop Brask.
Accordingly, he vindicated his conduct in a
published tract1 ; nor did his example want imitators
in the order to which he belonged. In the capital
the Latin mass was abolished by a resolution of the
magistrates. At the fair of St. Eric’s day, 1526,
Gustavus himself, sitting on horseback on one of
the barrows of Upsala, discoursed to the people
who stood round, on the uselessness of the Latin
service and the monastic life 2. Then repairing to
the chapter, he demanded of them, " by what right
the church held temporal power, and whether any
ground for its privileges was to be found in Holy
Scripture ;"—the New Testament, translated by
Laurence Anderson, having been printed this year
at the king’s instance. On the other hand, he
confirmed the privileges of knighthood and nobility at
a baronial diet held in Vadstena. He now sought
to acquire an ally against the church, and showed
the nobility what they might gain by the reduction
of the conventual estates, preferring himself,
before the council, a claim to the monastery of
Grips-holm, as heir of its founder, Steno Sture the elder.
His allegation was, that the consent which his father
gave to its foundation had been extorted. Shortly
afterwards, grounding himself on the voluntary
cession of the monks, he sequestrated the convent
without waiting for the declaration of the council.
An explanatory letter was issued to all the
provinces, intended, in his own words, to obviate evil
reports, for which end the transaction is
represented almost as an instance of the royal
generosity3. At the same time he wrote to bishop
Brask 4, who had undertaken to make an inventory
of the appurtenances of Nydala Abbey, " that he,
the king, would himself take order regarding the
nanveeder; they were sentenced to be beheaded and broken
on the wheel, and were accordingly executed in February,
1527, the former in Stockholm, the latter in Upsala.
4 Doctor Peter Bennetson, who travelled abroad in 1529,
received a commission from Brask to send into the country
glaziers and paper-makers, " to get knowledge of
water-hammers both for copper and iron," and also " to learn to work
in a laboratory," as the bishop meant to establish one. He
was likewise charged to buy for the latter not only breviaries
and mass-books, but also the latest juridical writings and
works of the Italian poets, seeing that " there were always
on sale in the city of Home many Italian treatises in rhyme,
as for instance ’ Inamoramentum Karoli Magni,
Inamora-mentum Renoldi vel Orlandi,’ &c." Scan. Mem. xiii. 114.
5 Brask, in a letter to Thure Jenson of the year 1526
(compare Linkciping’s Biblioth. Handl. i. 191), was the first to
propose that connection of the Baltic with the North Sea,
which has been effected in our own days by the Gbta canal.
’ Scan. Mem. xiii. 120.
7 He imputed to Steno Sture the elder the disturbances
which had vexed the kingdom for so many years (id. xiv. 47),
and had claims against Steno the younger, which were first
adjusted by an agreement with his widow.
8 Confirmatio d. Gostavi regis electi privilegiorum domini
Lincopensis et ecclesi® ibidem d. 18 Oct. 1523. 1. c. xvii. 170.
9 So Gustavus is said to have answered when the
archbishop thus pledged him at a banquet in Upsala, " Our grace
drinks to your grace." (Rhyzelius, Bishop’s Chronicle.) The
weak Joannes Magnus had come as papal legate to Sweden,
and as such was reverently received by the king; but he was
induced, by views upon the archiepiscopal chair, to treat the
new doctrines with great mildness. Incited by Brask, he
attempted afterwards to show his power, but with such
indiscretion that he was deprived, and obliged to quit Sweden
in the autumn of 1526, under the semblauce of a legation to
Poland. The same year Brask also seems to have resolved
upon flight; for he twice requested, though vainly, the king’s
consent to his visitation of Gottland, a pretext on which he
actually left the kingdom in the following year.
1 Een liten undervisning om echtenskapet, &c. A short
treatise of marriage, in whom it is commendable or not.
Stockholm, 1528.
2 The peasants called that they would keep their monks,
and not allow them to be driven out, but would themselves
feed and fodder them. Tegel.
3 In the letter of the monks on this affair, circulated at
the same time with that of the king, they say that they had
solicited the consent of his grace to their repairing every man
to his own friends, which he had been graciously pleased to
permit, and had distributed to them in addition clothes and
money to a great sum, for which he had taken into his own
hands, by way of indemnification, all the estates of the
monastery. In this way the king obtained even those to which
he could not lay any hereditary claim. These are doubtless
what the king means by the " estates which had fallen in
along with the others, and are not our own," in a letter to the
council, to whom he refers this matter. Register in the Ar
chives for 1526.
4 August 29, 1526.
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